A lot of my ideas lately have come from scrolling through my feed-reader and getting a spark of inspiration that usually has nothing to do with the blogger’s post. There is a first for everything, and today is a first for a correlated spark of inspiration. Zal over at Blessing of Fish was discussing how classes have changed over the years and it got me thinking about how a Moonkin use to work.

Moonkins use to be a joke, seriously, in vanilla it was very rare and almost unheard of to be blowing up things in Molten Core in the furry outfit. Even in Burning Crusade we were sub-optimal, producing low DPS being just a 5% spell crit vendor for our party only and a portable battle resurrection. Our mechanics were clunky as well, one of our 1st tier talents was a PvP talent that gave a CC when we got attacked, and we weren’t even that good in PvP. The worst mechanic that we had was the silly mana regeneration method (Were class developers high on “Moonkin Day”?) in which the laser-chicken would use his weapon in hand to whack the mob receiving back 2% mana per swing. At one time I had screenshots of me whacking Gruul, quite a sight to see.

The current state of Moonkin has been flung around so much lately that to beat a dead horse would accomplish nothing but bloody a nice shirt. Like every other class there are mechanics that won’t be fixed until the reset that is Cataclysm. That brings me to look forward and make a petition for some fun ideas for Moonkin, because Blizzard did say they were going to give us some fun talents instead making us dive into cookie-cutter specs, which will be much appreciated.

Without further adieu here’s the brainstorm:

Ever-living Root: This talent reflects something I have wished for since the first time I ever put Force of Nature out on the playing field. The tooltip would read: Your three Treants now become one and will always spawn when shifted into Moonkin Form unless killed. Your Treant is now only summonable while in Moonkin Form. Can you imagine running into combat, shifting into Moonkin and *BAM* your Treant spawns and makes a beeline for the target. Blizzard could even think of talents to take after this one to add utility, like a chance on hit to snare a target in Entangling Roots or a poison DoT. I don’t think the Treants get enough “Awesome Factor”; they only look really cool when they spawn and they carry the best death animation ever.

Moonlight Vine: I would strip Starfall and put this at the end of the Balance tree, it is a unique mixture of spells currently in WoW with a very fun twist on it. Tooltip as follows: 6 second Channeled – 60 second cooldown. A vine grips your target and up to 2 other targets within 10yds of each other slowing movement speed by 60% and pulsing X Arcane damage, every 2 seconds, down the vine. The further away the additional targets are from each other, the less damage is transferred. So I imagine this one like Mind Flay and Chain Lightning combined. I would deter this one to the PvP category, but I could see it used in PvE if a glyph was put in place to bust the CD a bit, or debuff a target for the duration of the CD to make it a constant.

Un-named Ability That Is Fun: So right now the casting sequence of a Boomkin kind of goes like this at the beginning of combat: IFF->Wrath->IS->MF->Wrath until Eclipse->SF until Eclipse, refresh DoT’s as needed. So your typical combat goes very bland, even weaving Starfall and Typhoon into the mix isn’t enough. I feel we need a spell that is based off of some debuff on the target. Call it “Moonkin’s Fury” or something of the nature, and it stacks based on DoT’s, and when the stack hits a certain cap you hit a certain button and it does damage or buffs self damage to the target, even curse the target. That sort of spell would be perfect, granted we’d have to watch something else to add to our DPS but it would break from the monotony of 1,2,3,4,4,4,4,5,2,3,5,5,5,5,4……you get what I mean. What if the debuff even changed its properties based on the stacks? Say at 5 stacks it increases damage, but let it get to 10 stacks and hit a certain button and it stuns the target for 10seconds. The possibilities are endless, I can even see it going to 50stacks, hitting “the button” and all your dots on the target are consumed at once. *Big Number causes heart attack* I could see something like this take precedent over the clunky Eclipse.

I have other ideas about giving Moonkin a new manner in damage dealing but they require a bit more thinking, and overall they kind of break mechanics, and would be very underpowered for what I view them doing. These three above are what I view as fun talents/spells that would give us some entertainment when we are spamming a couple buttons waiting for cooldowns.

I am also in the thought process of thinking how to give the Holy Priest some fun talents/spells that could be in the place of mandatory ones that Blizz is promising to take out to pull away from cookie-cutter specs.

Something I learned today: Ice T is a little too awesome. :-P

Peace be wit’ ya mon!

*Tip: Want to really tick off the Alliance, hold a guild meeting in the Stormwind Cathedral. Think about it…

4 responses to “Boomkin: Some Past, No Present, A Lot Of Future…..Please?”

Some interesting concepts here. Moonkins really are a bit of an oddball of the class design world; I co-raid-lead with one a lot of the time and often see where they benefit and where they fall.
And on your ‘Un-named Ability that is fun’ (Hah) there are ways that that could be implemented – I wouldn’t suggest a 50 stacking spell (Imagine how long it would take to get it on a boss, let alone trash) But a 5, 10 high stack could work. I’m thinking of the current model of seal of vengance – it DoTs the target, a new stack is applied every melee swing. Every stack the damage from the DoT increases. At 5 stacks each of the Paladin’s attacks also deals 33% weapon damage as additional Holy damage.
The ideas are there man, I’m rooting for moonkins! :) (Fear the terrible pun)

What my mind was conjuring was it stacking everytime IS or MF ticked, like the idols that Blizz is throwing at us. It wouldnt take long for eahc of those to tick 25 times a piece. The pally connection is what I was looking for, I couldnt recall what class had the stacking buff.

Everyone should root for Moonkins, we have moderate survivability and constricted defensive cooldowns. :-D